I think the traditional desktop will go away slowly anyways and most people will use operating systems like iOS and Android.
What a nightmarish hellscape that sounds like.
the year of the Linux desktop will be once Windows 10 stops getting updates
Where GNU/Linux works just fine are classical desktops, preferably self built.
Laptops sold by OEMs with Linux support.
I can't stand using a trackpad.
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under linux, while having a linux dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
But Windows will generally support every monitor and resolution/scale well which can't be said of Linux (which struggles with hidpi) or macOS (which can't do fractional scaling and has blurry fonts on lodpi).
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
FTFY
Whereas if you go with Windows and WSL2, everything just works with a lot less setup. WSL2 also has an x server now, which means graphical applications work under Windows.
For laptops, linux is the way to go because of i3wm, nothing as good as that exists for mac or windows, and because they are more resource constrained, you can do more tinkering and disable a bunch of things to speed up the system. For desktops however, the only reason I want linux is to do development, which pretty much only requires a file system and a linux terminal, which WSL2 with VSCode Remote SSH extension provides fully.